S97-E-00825

James D. Halsell, Jr., commander, poses in the cockpit of his T-38 jet trainer aircraft, after arriving at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF) along with the other members of his crew for the Terminal Countdown Demonstration Test (TCDT) exercises for their mission. The Microgravity Science Laboratory 1 (MSL-1) Spacelab Module is the primary payload on the 16-day mission. The MSL-1 will be used to test some of the hardware, facilities and procedures that are planned for use on the International Space Station (ISS), while the seven-member crew conducts combustion, Protein Crystal Growth (PCG) and materials processing experiments.